Monkey See

9:51 am

Tue December 4, 2012

Sundance 2013: Who Cares About Ashton Kutcher? Bring On Jesse And Celine!

Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs in jOBS, directed by Joshua Michael Stern, which will close the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Glen WilsonSundance Film Festival

The headline out of yesterday's announcement of the films that will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2013 had to do with jOBS (if it is up to me, I will never obey that silly typography again), the Steve Jobs biopic starring Ashton Kutcher wearing '70s facial hair.

Jesse and Celine are the couple played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy at the center of the 1995 romance Before Sunrise and the 2004 follow-up Before Sunset, both directed by Richard Linklater. In the first film, they meet on a train and impetuously spend the night together wandering around Vienna. It ends on a note of ambiguity that made the sequel seem like a potentially bad idea, but it turned out that revisiting these people who had met when they were really just kids was surprisingly satisfying. While Sunset is a little less purely sweet, it's a little more tinged with the realities of adulthood. Now, another eight-plus years after that, where will they be in Before Midnight?

Other featured films include Lovelace, starring Amanda Seyfried as adult film star Linda Lovelace; Don Jon's Addiction, directed by and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt; Top Of The Lake, co-written and co-directed by Jane Campion with a cast including Campion's The Piano star Holly Hunter; and The Way, Way Back, starring Steve Carell and Toni Collette and written by Jim Rash and Nat Faxon, who are both on TV (Rash on Community, Faxon on Ben & Kate) and who last worked together on the screenplay of The Descendants.

Meanwhile, the documentary premieres include features about Anita Hill, Jeremy Lin and Dick Cheney (not together), one on WikiLeaks, and one, called Running From Crazy, about Mariel Hemingway's encounters with the mental illness that has repeatedly touched her famous family.